Shared rules
Reduce technical, legal and organisational barriers to the use of data.
Policy, sovereignty & data spaces
From Europe’s data ambition to operational sovereignty.
Europe wants to make more high-quality data available for innovation, public value and AI—without organisations and data rights holders losing control. Data spaces make that balance operational.
01
2020 · The foundation
European Data Strategy
The strategy introduced the ambition for a European single market for data: data should be usable across the EU and across sectors while respecting European rules and values.
Common data spaces
Develop shared infrastructure and governance for strategic European domains.
Retain control
Allow data holders to determine under which conditions their data becomes available.
02
2025 · The next phase
Data Union Strategy
The Data Union Strategy builds on that foundation and connects it more directly to AI, competitiveness and strategic resilience.
Data for AI
Improve access to high-quality data and connect data spaces with AI ecosystems.
Simpler rules
Make the European data acquis easier to understand and apply.
Data sovereignty
Strengthen Europe’s ability to govern data, infrastructure and dependencies according to its interests.
InformationGrid perspective
What this means now.
This is our translation of Europe’s direction into design principles for organisations and data ecosystems—not a separate EU policy programme.
Make control and data rights explicit
Use verifiable access and usage conditions
Use open interfaces and avoid unnecessary dependencies
Organise trust and evidence across organisational boundaries
Sovereignty is not isolation
It means being able to collaborate deliberately while retaining control over data, conditions, technology choices and continuity.
From policy to practice
A dataspace makes these ambitions operational.
Shared governance and standards connect autonomous participants while data remains as close to its source as possible and conditions are applied explicitly.